Former editor goes online to help authors sell books

Kirk McKoy/Los Angeles Times Mary Ann Naples left her job at a book publisher to work for e-company OpenSky, where her area of expertise will be helping authors market books through the site.

About a year ago, Mary Ann Naples had a holy-cow moment. If she’d been a cartoon character, she would have smacked her forehead until stars came out.

She was standing atop an escalator at Book Expo America, the publishing world’s spring jamboree in New York, surveying a convention hall of sullen faces. Many of the 30,000 booksellers, publishers, authors and agents were looking like well-heeled passengers on a leaky cruise ship.

The rise of digital books and online retailing was upending book publishing’s business model. Publishers facing higher costs and less revenue were signing fewer authors; advances and royalties were declining; and bookstores were vanishing, leaving big American cities such as Laredo, Texas, without a single one.

And not least among the sky-is-falling signs, it was tougher to persuade a book editor, here in America’s publishing capital, to buy lunch, never mind underwrite a book party for an established author.

Although everyone agrees stories need to be told and distributed — most still through words in the form of sentences that make paragraphs that make chapters — the industry remains uncertain about future ways to turn a profit.

Naples’ escalator epiphany was that authors couldn’t rely on publishers and agents to sort out the future. They had to harness the internet on their own, to find new ways not only to draw audiences but also to keep them, and make money at it too. She’d observed how musicians were sidestepping the major labels by using online tools to connect with and sell their music directly to fans.

"There’s something through direct selling that can make a difference in an author’s career," she remembered thinking.

A year later, the Ivy League-educated Naples made a leap. After 20 years of birthing books — first as an editor and later as a literary agent — she joined OpenSky, a tech start-up in Lower Manhattan that is developing an online platform for established authors, bloggers and celebrities to sell products they believe in and can endorse right off their own websites.

The site, which went live this week, has so far signed up 1,000 such "tastemakers" and a slew of suppliers, and is designing tools to connect them with one another and shoppers as well as take care of all the messy details of commerce like warehousing, sourcing, shipping and billing.

A cookbook author, for example, not only sells books through OpenSky but also hawks a favorite barbecue sauce and grill. The author pockets 50 percent of the profit, with the rest going to OpenSky and others involved in the transaction.

This spring at Book Expo, instead of bearing a nametag that said "literary agent," Naples’ read "retail." And this time, standing atop that same escalator, she thought book publishing’s future looked a lot rosier.

In fact, it is still divided among pessimists (hoping to retire before the industry is unrecognizable), nihilists (contemptuous of books on paper and copyright laws) and optimists (eager to reinvent a digitized literary landscape).

Naples has decided to throw in her lot with the optimists.

Her recurring challenge at Book Expo, however, was to prove to literary pals that she was still in the same business they were: publishing. After one of those hair-tearing panels with big shots debating whether e-books hurt authors, Naples ran into moderator Simon Lipskar, a literary agent.

"You’re doing the smart thing," Lipskar said, half-teasing, half-serious, "getting the hell out of this business."